Abuse and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

There are those people in all our lives whom we feel safe with and there are those with whom we don’t.  It’s great to attach to safe people—we nurture and enjoy each other.  But it’s often necessary to detach from those people who regularly, consistently, constantly manipulate and intimidate.

Those we feel less safe with, even if it’s a feeling we discern almost unconsciously to begin with, make us feel vulnerable at varying levels.

These are the harms done, aligning with Maslow’s hierarchy (in reverse order), to help you understand when and why you can barely discern them:

1.             Physiological needs – this seems obvious, but when people deprive people of nutritious food, clean water, safe shelter, adequate sleep, warming or cooling clothing, etc., they hit at the heart of the cruelest humanity.  Deprival at this level will almost always be done in secret behind closed doors, much so that the abused person feels completely isolated.  The best of relationships is in the provision of all our needs in this basic physiological sense.  Imagine having to beg for what many, many humans take for granted.

2.             Safety needs – still such basic needs, deprival of these needs leaves us feeling threatened, aggressed, even traumatised.  It’s frightening to be assaulted.  But just as much, to be deprived of employment so we can’t make a living, and especially when we cannot get the resources we need, and cannot maintain our health, we enter existential crisis.  It always finishes with rapid diminishment of our mental and emotional health.  When people deprive people of these basic needs it’s patently criminal.

3.             Belongingness and love needs – now we get into the heart of emotional and spiritual abuse.  Sometimes the deprival of these needs is deliberate, and sometimes it’s not acknowledged in such obvious ways, but when a person is deprived of the connection to friendship and the intimacy of loved ones, their soul begins to grow sick and die.  Souls begin to die when there’s a paucity of hope, unless the soul believes better is coming by faith.  Where people sense they’re being cut off from human connection, there is a very real problem.  Connection needs are inherently basic human needs.

4.             Esteem needs – once again, you might find that anyone who deprives you of your feeling good about life and yourself amid your life is bent on your inward destruction.  These include those who are jealous about your status (at whatever level), and those who are threatened about what strengths and freedoms you possess.  These abuses can often be subtle, and it’s in being separated from these needs – isolated not less – that makes the subtleties more obvious.  Of course, your abuser will always deny it and gaslight you to your face.

5.             Self-actualisation needs – perhaps the subtlest of all abuses, done by those who don’t want you to succeed at any level, and will even go to bizarre lengths to ensure you remain ‘mediocre’.  This gets weirder when people justify this as doing you a favour; they’re doing it always for your own benefit, so loving and considerate are they – NOT!

We ought to be able to be vulnerable without being taken advantage of.  But abuse makes us feel vulnerable when we least feel safe.  Use the above to try and understand WHY it is you’re feeling vulnerable when you least feel safe.